Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an improved process for the production of a cookie-like product.
Background Art
The preparation of baked cookies is an art that has been practiced for many years. Cookies are small sweet dough products that generally are made from flour, water, shortening and sugar. In addition to these ingredients, optional flavoring materials often are added. At its simplest, the preparation of cookies involves the following steps: mixing of the ingredients to form a dough; forming the mixed dough into preforms; and baking the preforms. During and after baking, the baked product undergoes equilibration, which is characterized by the migration and evaporation of moisture from and within the cookie matrix and by crystallization of sugar within the matrix. Therefore, sugar not only provides sweetness to cookies but also contributes to the structural and textural properties of cookies. What distinguishes cookies texturally from other forms of baked dough products is that cookies have a distinctly friable, short, crumb texture.
With previous types of mass-produced cookies, the ingredients generally have been mixed by batch processes that are labor intensive and can result in batch-to-batch variation in uniformity. Also, these processes require a relatively large amount of capital equipment, energy, and space, especially for baking the cookie dough into a finished product. For example, in a conventional rotary mold method for producing cookies, a dough is prepared typically in a batch mixing operation by combining water with flour, powdered sugar, shortening, salt, soda, and other flavors, colors, leavenings, etc. as may be desired.
After mixing, the dough is introduced into the molds of a rotary molder, a cylinder having multiple molds engraved upon its surface. The pieces of molded dough are removed from the molds and placed on a baking conveyor which proceeds through a high capacity continuous baking oven. Typical ovens used with rotary molding machines are up to 300 feet in length or more, see, e.g., "Biscuit and Cracker Handbook", 1981, The Biscuit Bakers Institute, 1660 L Street N.W., Washington., DC 20036.
After baking, the cookies are cooled prior to packaging. In some cases, a cream is deposited upon one cookie and another cookie is deposited on top of the cream to create a sandwich cookie.
The conventional method as outlined above utilizes large amounts of space inside a factory. Moreover, it is difficult to reduce the amount of space required since the continuous baking is carried out in a straight line from the molder to at least the end of the oven, which can be several hundred feet in length. The cost of the large amount of space required by the manufacturing facility adds to the cost of cookie production. Therefore, a process that could produce cookies continuously and in a small amount of space would be a significant advancement in cookie production technology.
Methods for continuously producing biscuits using cooking extruders are known. Cooking extruders continuously cook the dough therein, and extrude it at high temperatures. For example, U.K. Patent Application No. 2,136,666 discloses a method for producing a biscuit wherein a mixture containing 43% to 93% amylaceous powder, 0% to 30% sugar and 2% to 12% edible oil and/or fat is cooked in a cooking extruder. U.K. Patent Application G.B. 2,131,670 discloses a method of preparing a food product by mixing starch, starch-derived or starch-based material with at least its own weight of at least one sugar or sugar derivative. This method includes one step in which the mixture is subjected to cooking extrusion. The use of cooking-type extruders in the production of cookies produces a product that is generally considered to have undesirable flavor, textural and structural characteristics. This is because prior art cooking extrusion processes gelatinize the starch in the dough and therefore produce products with hard, crispy, cellular textures. As a result, the products produced by conventional extrusion methods do not have the friable, short, crumb texture typical of cookies.
There thus exists a need in the art for an extrusion process that produces a cookie-like product having desirable cookie flavor and texture characteristics.